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The Graduate Student Committee of PSi is seeking feedback from graduate students on how we can serve the community better. Questions and opinions on graduate student housing, registration costs, access to information about the organisation, networking opportunities amongst fellow students and professors, possibilities of mentorship, as well as other issues and concerns in regards to the yearly international conferences as pertaining to graduate students are welcomed.

The Graduate Student Committee will collate and present this information in June at the annual AGM of the PSi Committee to be held in Zagreb, Croatia. We hope to actively address the concerns and needs of fellow graduate students.

We also welcome all graduate students travelling to Zagreb to attend the annual meeting of the Graduate Student Committee. The exact date and time will be annnounced closer to the dates of the conference.

You may remember at the last conference, Ed Scheer was talking about his visit to a Performance Studies research centre in Morocco. Well, this centre has a conference coming up next May and the organizing committee have told us that they would warmly welcome applications from international graduates for the emerging scholars panel. See below for more information and click here to download the full text of the call for papers.

The deadline is January 15th 2009, but please note that you need to submit a 10-12-page paper at this time, not just an abstract.

Best

Laura and Melissa

‘The Interconnection of Performance Cultures’
Between the two banks of the Mediterranean
An International conference: homage to Pr Dr Abderrahmane Ben Zidane
Tangier, May 23-24, 2009

Call for papers

Human cultures live constantly in a process of symbolic and material exchange. Still, there is always an excess of continuum between essential sameness and marked strangeness. The recent debates on the politics of intercultural theatre practice have not only critiqued such artistic ‘syncretism’ and negotiations, but articulated an optimistic belief in the achievability of a common “interweaving” across worldwide performance cultures. Erica Fischer-Lichte is justly acclaimed as an exemplary demystifier –the thinker who has provided unsurpassed critiques of Eurocentric intercultural performance elements that lurk in the work of various western theatrical enterprises that went East & South. “The starting point for intercultural staging”, Fisher-Lichte rightly argues, “is thus not primarily an interest in the foreign –the foreign theatre or the foreign culture from which it is taken- but rather a situation completely specific within its own culture or a completely specific problem having its origin within its own theatre.” (1990: 283) Indeed, only few researchers go back to the Indian origins of Mahabharata, while everyone celebrates the achievements of Peter Brook, for instance.

For more than ten years our concern with theatrical hybridity was central to our study of the various forms the subalterns perform back while repeating Master models, yet in a different way or rather a different sameness of “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1994: 86). But do we have to consider hybridity as the ultimate and inexorable condition of all postcolonial subjectivities? Or shall we think of it as a road map leading to alternative exchanges? We know that these postcolonial subjectivities are just as diverse and their histories just as varied as the peoples who were colonized are. Today, our conception of theatrical hybridity has become source of some revisionism thanks to the research program entitled “The Interweaving of Performance Cultures” developed by the eminent Professors Erica Fisher-Lichte and Gabriele Brandsletter at the Freie University in Berlin. Such research creates new horizons for the diversity of performance that has an incredible capacity to incorporate and integrate diasporic identities and migrating groups.

What bestows the Mediterranean performance traditions with a particular touch is the fact that they mirror the multiple facets of diverse cultures that have coexisted within the Mediterranean space: an irregular and fertile region for the Europeans, Arabs, Imazighen, and Africans… The conference places this diversity of performance cultures in the core of its debates, and in fact a worth studying reflection and research theme, in order to bring out discourses and scientific studies about the entwining of performance traditions within the two banks of the Mediterranean sea from past to present. Our objectives are also the location of middle-grounds of performativity where binary relationships dissolve and become more and more intertwined, and ultimately the search for thematic and conceptual crossovers of different performance practices.

The conference is also a home for graduate students and emerging scholars from different parts of the world. The establishment of an emerging Scholars’ panel invites new voices to join the debate. Up to three participants will be selected for this panel, and each panelist will have fifteen minutes to deliver her/his paper. Graduate students whose papers are accepted will receive free conference registration, free admission to conference luncheon, and a one-year membership in ICPS. To be considered for this panel, please submit your 10-12-page paper by January 15th 2009 to Pr Khalid Amine. Since the conference is again pulling a very international public, registered attendees will be welcome too.